Every so often I set my alarm early and get up before everybody else. The only sound is the gas boiler in the kitchen, which is set to come on at about 5am to heat the water. If the rain is battering off the window, the house is even cosier as I lounge on the couch in my pyjamas.
I switch on the telly and read the news on my phone while I’m waiting for the coffee machine to do its gurgly thing and for the ping of the microwave that makes the porridge. Myself and Tadgh have deep and meaningfuls about life, the kids, work, politics, what we might eat for breakfast.
Sometimes I rub his face or ever-so-gently behind his ears. He doesn’t say much in response, but stares at me as I talk and hangs on my every word, regardless of the quality of the concept, with merely the twitch of an eyebrow or a sideways glance of approval. It’s not that he’s particularly shy or reserved, but that he is a medium-sized terrier, crossed with a beagle, crossed with a greyhound, crossed with a mongrel.
He has a dislike of other small mammals and a love for humans. He is part of our lives. He gets to sneak upstairs when nobody is looking and will find a nice spot on a clean duvet to bed down. He has licked pretty much every plate in the house before it goes in the dishwasher. We wrestle with him on the ground and he pretends to attack us. I often talk to him in a funny voice as if he were a small child. I swear to God I’ve seen him smile, but unless you’re a “dog person” you won’t believe that.
Dinosaur dinner
He’s not perfect. He has urinated on the mat near the back door a handful of times; the playroom where he hangs out can smell of dog when he gets wet (and sometimes when he is dry). He does rather like to chew up dinosaur figurines of an evening if the requisite attention is not afforded him.
He was abandoned at the side of a country road as a young dog. He therefore came to us with a backstory, a big heart but, alas, no social skills whatsoever. So he never liked another animal, which we discovered the first time I had him in the vet’s surgery for his vaccinations and neutering. As I searched for my debit card in a reluctant pocket, he proceeded to attack a fluffy show dog that was passing through reception in the arms of a nurse. Morto for the owner. Tadgh would rather rip another dog or a cat limb from limb than sniff its behind. He is deeply flawed, but we love him a lot and we have tried to give him as good a life as possible within the confines of a small suburban garden.
Dogs I have known
I’ve always been both a “dog person” and a “cat person” but if it came to it I’d declare for the dogs. There was Tim. My brother Andrew and I found him dead outside the back door from eating poison on nearby land. Nipper, a fox terrier, liked to chase motorbikes and was spirited away soon after arriving into our lives. Sadie died of a mysterious virus days after we got her from the pound. Daisy shuffled off due to old age.
Then there was Winkie. One of my vivid childhood memories is about Winkie. My mother and I were driving the backroads from Duleek in the dark and lashing rain. I was sitting in the back seat. We didn’t speak and both of us were crying. The vet, Christopher, had just let us say our final goodbyes to Winkie, as she was old and riddled with cancer.
Winkie, so named because of a strange thing she did with her eyes, was an octogenarian in dog years. We adopted her from a neighbour called Mrs McGivor, who was moving to Navan and couldn’t bring her along. The dog would drop down to us a lot anyway; our houses were separated only by a field of horses.
As we cried our way home, our world seemed to have come crumbling down around us. Christopher’s words had rung in our ears as he held poor Winkie for the last time on his examination table: “Would you like to say goodbye?”
I recalled key moments Winkie’s life, such as the time she miscarried a single pup in my granny’s garage in Thurles; it was her only pregnancy. I remembered the way she would run around corners on three legs, the way she would make little grunting noises when you talked to her, the way she liked to be covered with a blanket every night, the way the cats would steal her bed and would scratch her face if she tried to lay claim to it again. I remembered the way she used to sit on my knee as I sat in front of the heater in the kitchen in the mornings before school in the 1980s.
Some day Tadgh will be brought to the vet for his final visit, and I know I will cry for him too, flaws and all.